Transcription
Thinkific creates professional online courses using generative AI and an intuitive drag and drop builder. In this tutorial, we'll guide you through building a complete course from detailed lesson plans to full branding so you can launch it today. While I'll be building a course on the basics of affiliate marketing, the steps I'll share today apply to any content creator, educator, or expert looking to share their knowledge.
Throughout this tutorial, we'll see how to set up your Thinkific account, navigate the dashboard, build and edit your course, structure your content properly, customize the student experience, price and publish your course, and begin marketing it with Thinkific's built-in tools. Let's get started.
Chapter one, sign up and onboarding. Click the link in the description to sign up for Thinkific. It'll take you to this page where you'll want to click start free trial. You can sign up with an email address and password or with your Google account. Continue to follow the on-screen instructions until you arrive on this page. Unfortunately, you'll have to enter a credit card to give Thinkific a try. Don't worry, the free trial lasts for 30 days and I'll show you how to cancel your trial later in the video. Confirm that you've linked your card to your account and then continue to follow the on-screen instructions. Make sure to select course and paid course. After a few more clicks, you'll land on this page. Thinkific leverages AI to generate a course outline. Let's explore how to make the most of this feature and ensure you get a good starting point.
Chapter 2, prompting your course. I could fill a whole video on the ins and outs of prompting AI. For today, however, here's what you have to know. AI requires both clarity and specificity. Avoid adding unnecessary complexity, but don't be vague either. Aim for detailed, precise instructions that capture exactly what you want the AI to do and how you want it to do it. Provide context and background. For example, I want the AI to incorporate elements of my brand and voice into the course it generates. So, my prompt will include links to my YouTube channel and website. That's easier said than done. So, take your time to make your prompt as good as it can be.
Now, my prompt is far too long for me to read out word for word. Instead, I'll tell you how I organized it. My prompt is broken into three sections: broad objectives, core structure, and the dos and don'ts. I believe each of these titles is relatively self-explanatory, so it's time to move on. When you have a prompt you're happy with, click create. This is going to take several minutes, so I'll see you when it's completed. All right, so here's the first outline of my course. Before we started using the drag and drop editor to make changes, let's take a look around the dashboard first.
Chapter 3, dashboard tour. Click home in the upper left corner. That will take you to the admin homepage from anywhere in the app. This is the heart of Thinkific. Right now, there will be an onboarding guide. In the future, this page will display your product offerings, sales performance, engagement rate, and other key metrics. For now, take a look at the left sidebar. I'll walk you through what each of these tools buttons does.
Products. This is where you'll create, edit, and price courses, bundles, memberships, webinars, and other digital products. This is also where you will find your video library.
Channels. This is another place where you can build and customize your course's digital footprint. More in-depth than products, this view lets you work on each page individually, such as your landing page, signup page, certificate page, etc. This is also where you manage your mobile app.
Marketing. This is essentially a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) platform. You can track leads, build and manage a sales pipeline, handle your affiliates, and run email campaigns from here.
Sales. Where you can create bundles, set up coupons, manage orders, and handle invoices.
Users. This is where you'll manage groups and individual students, as well as track their progress, and get involved with discussions, a type of built-in forum.
Analytics. Here is where you'll crunch the numbers, check sales, total orders, student engagement, and more.
Learner hub. This is a very important page. This is where you can edit the page that your learners, students, see when they log in. You can promote other courses, include words of encouragement, share additional resources, offer one-on-one coaching, and even establish a support desk.
Accounts. Here is where you can manage everything to do with your accounts, including your free trial. Open account and select account management. Select manage subscriptions at the bottom of the page and click cancel plan. Follow the on-screen instructions and your trial will be over.
Integrations. Here you'll connect with third-party apps to give your course even more functionality. For example, integrating with Zoom will allow your students to meet directly with you without changing platforms.
Settings. Global platform settings like payments, domains, emails, tax information, and other base settings.
Woo! That was a lot of ground to cover, but now that you know your way around the entire Thinkific interface, it's time to start working on your generated course.
Chapter 4, curriculum structure and design. Open products, select courses, and click on your course. You'll land on curriculum, and this is where you'll manage your course's content. We'll come back here in a moment. For now, first things first, open settings, and if you want, change the name of your course. I'll be keeping mine as is. Once you've changed your course's name, click save settings at the bottom. Head back over to curriculum. Since we started with the AI course builder, we'll see that my curriculum is already filled out. Still, let's take a moment to understand how the curriculum is organized. Thinkific divides courses into two sections. The first are chapters or modules that serve as high-level silos. Within a chapter, there can be one or more lessons, individual pieces of content. Chapters are fairly straightforward, but there are several different types of lessons. Looking at my first chapter, we'll see that there are two lessons: Understanding affiliate marketing, business models explained. Next to each is an icon that denotes what format the lesson is in. Each of my chapters contain a video and text lesson. Let's look at the other types of lessons by clicking add lesson. Beyond video and text lessons, there are also PDFs, quizzes, audio files, other downloadables, multimedia embeds, surveys, presentations, assignments, and live Zoom calls. There's no limit to the number of chapters in a course or to the number of lessons in a chapter. In short, you have complete control over your course's structure.
Pro tip, most people are visual and or auditory learners. With this in mind, I recommend using as many videos as possible. This will boost your overall student engagement and it'll create a more enjoyable learning experience.
Pro tip number two. We'll build a lesson together in a moment, but let's quickly take a look at chapter 1. Click it. Make sure to go through each of your chapters, check the box next to set new lessons to draft by default, and click save. This ensures that when you revise content or add new lessons, your changes won't be immediately visible to students until you're ready.
Let's create a new lesson. Click add lesson under your first chapter. I'm going to create a quiz. That will pull up this page. Depending on the type of lesson you're adding or editing, it will look slightly different. First things first, give it a title. I'll go with quiz on the basics of affiliate marketing. Before I go through adding questions, look at the lesson settings. Here you can choose to make this lesson a free preview or a prerequisite. Now, setting this quiz as a free lesson makes no sense. Instead, I recommend making your first video lecture at the very least free. It's just good business. You'll give potential students a sneak peek of what they can expect. As for prerequisites, this depends on you. Do you want to give your students complete flexibility or do you want them to learn as much as possible? Making a lesson a prerequisite essentially prevents students from accessing the next lesson or chapter until it's completed. I will mark the quiz as a prerequisite so my students can learn as much as possible. As you can see, this lets me set the message students see when trying to skip. For now, I'll leave it as is, but it shows how Thinkific guides you through the entire process. You can also enable discussions for individual lessons or the entire course. Although it will take more time, I recommend manually enabling discussions for lectures or assignments, but not for quizzes. That way, students can share answers. I'll also require students to earn a passing grade on this quiz, with passing being 70% or above.
Now, I can either create questions manually or let the AI handle it by referencing the rest of the chapter's materials. I'll create these questions manually, but I'll do it later. For now, I'll hit save lesson.
Let's take a look at the video lesson, understanding affiliate marketing. I'll open it. I can rename the lesson and add the video lesson from either Thinkific's video library or my computer by clicking browse files. Video files are limited to 2 GB and I strongly recommend compressing your videos before uploading. That way, they'll load much faster for students. I'll head over to the video library and drag and drop this file and be back once it's uploaded. All right, now it's time to customize this video and make it the best it can be. Click the three dots on the right-hand side and select edit. Here is where you can choose a thumbnail, make the video private, enable captions, and view video analytics. I'm going to leave everything as is except the title. I'll change that by clicking the pencil at the very top and renaming this video the basics of affiliate marketing. I'll go back to courses, click on my course, and open the lesson named Understanding Affiliate Marketing. I'll click select a video file and select the basics of affiliate marketing. Now, I can add a brief text description of the video and manage the lesson settings we saw earlier. By the way, since this is the first video lecture of my course, I'm going to make this a free preview lesson by checking the box here. Now, I'll click save lesson.
Now, while the specifics will vary slightly depending on the type of lesson you're creating, the basics will remain the same. Now, go and prepare your course. When all your course's content is uploaded, structured, and ready to go, you'll want to protect it. That's what we will address in the next chapter.
Chapter 5, settings and security. Click settings at the top of the page. Now, there's far too much here for me to cover it all in today's video. Still, I'll show you the most important ones. Toward the top underneath course name and instructor is access. By default, your course, its URL is visible. Anyone with an internet connection can find your website and sign up for your course. Private means your course is still discoverable online, but students must request access. Hidden means the course is not discoverable online and you need to send prospective students a link to sign up.
Security is a major one. Here you can prevent students from copying any text that appears in the course. This is a judgment call. Do you value flexibility and ease of use for your students or are you willing to sacrifice these benefits to protect your work? Personally, I will let my students copy text if they want. They're paying for the course and as long as they don't monetize what they copy, they should be free to take notes and jot down major ideas. You can also delete the course from this page. Simply click delete course. After this, most settings are cosmetic and branding related. Set a course image and description, adjust the theme from light to dark, select a color palette, choose fonts, etc.
Scrolling toward the bottom, however, there are two features that deserve a bit more explanation. The first of these is drip scheduling. This essentially limits how quickly students can progress through the course. Honestly, it's very situational. For an open registration course where everyone can work at their own pace, enabling drip scheduling is a bad idea. However, if you're teaching a large cohort starting at the same time, it makes sense to time gate the contents. It will force them to work together and likely enable more in-depth discussions. The other feature is course completion certificates. Whether you issue these is up to you. If you do, check the box next to completion certificates and then click create certificate. That will pull up the certificate editor. Here you can switch between pre-made templates, change the content displayed on the certificate, and edit its design as well. Again, it's the little things that matter, so I recommend taking the time to create a visually appealing certificate that reflects you and your brand. Whenever you're done, of course, make sure to click save in the upper right corner.
All right, so at this point, your content is up and ready to go and your security settings are properly configured, but you're far from done. Now, let's move on and talk about customizing your course's landing page.
Chapter six, editing your course's landing page. Head back to products in the sidebar. Select courses. Click on your course and select landing page at the top. The first thing you have to do is choose a theme preset. You can also choose to start from a basic preset. That's what I'm going to do. At the top of the page, you can change the slug of the landing page URL. Click the pencil next to the URL in the upper right of the page. I'll change the slug to "Veloc affiliate marketing course" and confirm it.
Now to edit the landing page itself, click edit page in the bottom center. This is where it becomes much more like a traditional web builder. The page is divided into sections, each composed of individual pieces of content called elements. Each element can be edited simply by clicking on it. For example, I'll click on the subheading "Build and optimize websites" down here. I'll change it to "Find and join affiliate programs." I'll also change the description beneath the heading to "Find reputable, high-paying affiliate programs that fit your brand."
Now, click the paintbrush icon in the upper right. Here, you can change the color scheme you want to use. I'll open theme, select professional since it fits my company's color scheme, and click save.
Pro tip, most people who visit your landing page will be on their phones. In the upper right, switch the view from desktop to mobile from time to time and make sure everything looks as it should. Although you can only edit the landing page in desktop mode, maintaining a professional mobile version of your site should be your top priority.
Now, it's time to replace these pictures. I'll click on the banner at the top of the page, which will pull up this window. I'll click upload. And from here, you have a couple of different ways to import pictures. You can upload images directly from your PC, browse the internet, access Google Drive, or snag something from Facebook or Instagram. I'll go ahead and upload an image from my PC. There we go. Now, I'll go ahead and click upload. I'll go ahead and nudge the image and adjust the scaling slider until I get it just right. Then click apply. As you can see, the image is somewhat pixelated and I couldn't get "affiliate" to fit at the top. If I were building this course for real, I would produce a high-quality image tailored to these dimensions. But for now, this example serves its purpose. But what if I don't like the banner size? Can I change it? Absolutely. To change how any section looks, click it, select edit section, and from the layout tab, I'll select the first one, and hit apply. Of course, that doesn't completely fix the issues with my uploaded image, but you get the picture. With a little effort and patience, everything is fully customizable. Whenever you're happy with a change, make sure to click save in the upper right corner.
Now that you know how to customize your landing page, let's talk everyone's favorite topic, money.
Chapter 7, pricing your course. Setting a price for your course is difficult. It depends on several factors: your expertise, track record, community size, the number of lessons and chapters, etc. For me, it makes sense to have my students pay a one-time fee. Though, you can also offer the course for free or charge a monthly fee. I think I'll keep the course priced at $99, but I'll drop it to $90 to try and entice a few more buyers. To edit that, I'll click the three horizontal buttons right here and select edit. I'll drop the price by $9 and let students access the course for a full year, 365 days. Now I'll click save primary pricing.
All right, with the payment structure set up, it's time to let you get paid. Click set up payments. Make sure to verify your email address if you haven't. Once you've done that, go ahead and refresh the page. Now, make sure your location is set and click setup Thinkific payments. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up payments. Once that's done, there are a few after-purchase settings to handle. Click on channels and select website. Here, I recommend customizing the checkout thank you page at the very least. You'll be using the same drag and drop interface we used to customize your landing page. Once that's done, all that's left is to publish your course. Exit off this window and go back to your course. Click publish in the upper right corner. Follow the few on-screen instructions and you're good to go.
Remember to click the link in the description to sign up for your Thinkific free trial and get an exclusive discount if you purchase a subscription. Share the topic of your first course in the comments below.